A Birthday Feast, part 4

A Birthday Feast, part 4

I smirk at the word “respectable,” but tug my bikini top and my shorts into place all the same. The only other car around is quite a way down the beach road, and the only company we ever have at this beach are one or two couples looking equally for privacy. It’s a perfect spot, our secluded beach: a rocky cove, nearly perfectly half-moon shaped, like a bowl cut out of the rocky coast, and with a fine dark sandy bottom that takes a good twenty minutes of hiking down a rocky path to reach. It’s no wonder that ordinary beach-goers don’t bother with it.

I grab one basket, and toss a blanket over my shoulder. Andale grabs the other, and we make our way down the trail. We’re both temporarily satisfied, ravenous, and giggling as we pick our way around the rocks. “You really weren’t playing fair in the car,” she says to me. “Fair! It’s hardly fair that you get to drive every time! You only do it because it makes you come. And I’m not supposed to get off?” Again we burst into giggles

The last bit of the trail is lined with rather tall reeds growing through the rocks, and shielding the beach even from the path, and as we come ’round to the beach, skidding and giggling down the last bit of slope, I stop short, and gasp, stunned. There, stretched out, naked and beautiful, on the large flat rock that we always joke about turning into our altar to the sea goddesses, there is a woman. More precisely, there are two women, but only one is stretched out on the rock. And she isn’t moving, but she gasps at our appearance. The other woman stands at her head. She is dressed in a rather diaphanous “cover up” that covers very little and enhances everything it does cover.

And somehow neither the woman in the diaphanous cover up nor Andale seems at all surprised by this arrangement. I am immediately suspicious, and delighted. I look again at the woman stretched out on our rock. She is, in fact, bound to it somehow. Her legs are spread and I can see ropes holding them taut, and her arms, likewise, are spread wide, and clearly secured, though I can’t quite make out how. For all the world, she looks like Prometheus bound to his rock, but smiling and with longer hair.

I turn to Andale, who has just stopped short behind me. I feel her arm around my waist as she steps to the side, and walks us both over to these two beautiful women. The standing one extends her hand to Andale and says, “I’m Kate. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person. This is Janie, and I’ve prepared her just as you asked.” Andale raises Kates hand to her lips and kisses it graciously. “Thank you Kate,” she says, rather formally. “And Janie, you look lovely laid out for us like that. Kate has told us about your hum. By the time you are released from your rock I think we’ll have quieted it a bit.” And turning to me, with her Cheshire Cat grin, she says “Molly, you do think we can devour this delectable morsel in addition to all we’ve brought, don’t you?”

Visions of Janie, spread with fruit, cheese, wine, and chocolate swim in my imagination and I smile at Andale and Kate and say, “Oh, yes, I don’t think we’ll let anything go to waste.”

A Birthday Feast, part 4, written by Molly. For part 5 click here. To see all the pieces of this story, click here.

~ by Molly Montrevoir on February 16, 2007.